For Cindy Crawford and family an island getaway in central Ontario is dressed-down, off-the-radar bliss.

When Cindy Crawford docks her powerboat at a lakeside convenience store in a tiny Canadian village, grabs a few homemade cinnamon doughnuts, then speeds off into a perfect July afternoon, it’s hard not to think of the iconic 1991 Pepsi commercial in which the model emerged from a red Lamborghini to quench her thirst at a gas-station vending machine.

But in this quiet summer community in central Ontario, where seven years ago she and her husband, Rande Gerber, built a house on a granite island blanketed in soft moss and studded with wild blueberry bushes, Cindy would prefer to be as underwhelming as her natural gifts allow. For about a month every summer, she wears no makeup, she makes no plans, she sits hour after uninterrupted hour on the dock or takes “granny swims,” as she calls them, with the friends she sees here but nowhere else, their husbands circling protectively on their paddleboards. “You’re the real you up here,” she explains as Rande’s Wakesetter carves through the sparkling lake. “You never have your game face on, your party face. When you’re getting dragged behind a boat on an inner tube, it’s hard to have much of a facade.”

The wind has given her a big eighties blow-out—classic Cindy, but here the coiffure of every woman who travels by speedboat. Though time has brought a chiseled refinement to her features, her face remains one of the most familiar on the planet. Cindy is, of course, one of the few women for whom the word supermodel is not overstatement; a darling of designers and editors, she has also had tremendous versatility, offering proof, long before Gisele Bündchen, that a clever model can turn herself into a global brand. Sexy but approachable, Cindy was, and indeed is, the nice girl in the naughty body, her enormous appeal magnified by the knowledge that she was also her high school’s valedictorian. Despite a few bumps in the road—a highly publicized divorce from Richard Gere, a misbegotten entrée into Hollywood in Fair Game—she has made a graceful exit from fashion’s inner sancta. She does assorted campaigns and editorial work, she helms a successful furniture line, and she is a partner in the skin-care line Meaningful Beauty, but notwithstanding an impressive collection of old Alaïa she has set aside for her daughter, fashion has receded somewhat from view. “I have friends who know what the season’s It bag is going to be months before it comes out,” she says, “and that was just never me.”

We are in a part of Canada known as cottage country, for more than a century the weekend colony of moneyed Torontonians who built clapboard homes on the shoreline and painted them so dark they all but disappeared into the pines. It’s a place of stunning beauty and, for a certain kind of visitor, comforting remoteness; dotted among the Brahmins, a handful of Hollywood big shots have sought privacy along these shores. “That anonymity is certainly nice,” Cindy says, “though these days I’m the perfect amount of famous: enough to get a dinner reservation but not enough to get hassled.”

Cindy and Rande, a Casamigos Tequila owner, have no particular reason to be here, except that they fell for the place thirteen years ago when friends invited them for a week. Despite living in Malibu the rest of the year, they are lake people at their core: Rande spent his boyhood summers at sleepaway camp in New Hampshire, while Cindy waxes nostalgic about the cabin her family used to rent in a mosquito-plagued corner of Minnesota. Up here, residents are called cottagers. “I like to think that we’re especially hard-core,” says Cindy, “because we’re island cottagers. There’s no getting into the car and going to the movies when it rains.”

The seven-acre plot, when the Gerbers bought it, contained a dilapidated fishing cabin with linoleum floors. “The Old Guard doesn’t touch their houses,” Rande says. The Gerbers studied the local vernacular of shingled, two-story boathouses and rustic hunting lodges and settled on a discreet log cabin with dark timber interiors. Alfredo Paredes, a Ralph Lauren executive and good friend, helped with the decorating. “Every house here is a Ralph Lauren ad already,” Cindy remarks.

The couple, who have now designed seven houses together, from the Upper East Side to Cabo San Lucas, think about their living spaces differently. “Rande pictures every place filled with people socializing,” Cindy explains, “and I’m always saying, ‘But what about when no one is here? Then where are we sitting?’ ” Here they agreed on a warmly appointed chalet with brass lanterns, miniature canoes, and dream catchers made by the local Ojibwa tribe. The seat of an old leather club chair is upholstered in a Pendleton blanket, and a credenza from a bar Rande once owned in Aspen stands beside a lounger from a former house of Cindy’s in DeKalb, Illinois, the town where she grew up. Tacked onto a bulletin board is a thank-you note from friends across the lake inscribed on a curling piece of birch bark—the customary local stationery.

Months before their annual trip, really as soon as spring break begins to wind down, the family starts thinking about the wild blueberries, the doughnuts, a nutty cheese called Niagara Gold, and the poutine at a greasy spoon near the marina. Presley, sixteen, and Kaia, thirteen, fling themselves into the water the second the seaplane skids onto the surface of the lake. It’s the only time of year, Rande says, when the kids don’t turn on the television or pick up their phones.

Cindy makes her famous banana bread before the kids are up. Water sports from the expansive east-facing dock dominate the daylight hours: Presley likes to cruise the lake in his Whaler (though he just learned to drive a car, he has had his boating license since age nine); there is cliff diving nearby, bass fishing, logrolling, and wake surfing. When they’re bored with straight-up waterskiing, the kids will tow their friends on trash-can lids. At sunset, the family piles into a boat with drinks and snacks; perhaps they’ll see friends on a dock somewhere and pull up for an hour. Back at home, there is shuffleboard in the screened-in porch, and Cindy and Kaia have a puzzle going. Rande is in charge of the playlist; a near-constant mix of classic rock, from Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young to Pearl Jam, pipes out of invisible speakers. (Kaia: “I’ve been listening to those songs my entire life.”)

The community’s prevailing social ritual is the “docktail” party, as lakeside soirees are called. “There’s a golf club that we’re not members of,” Cindy says, “and if there are Old Guard ladies having tea somewhere, I haven’t been invited.” The uniform is invariably casual: swimsuits and cover-ups. Sometimes the kids chuckle when Cindy comes out of the house in nothing but her bikini, Muk Luks, and gardening gloves to pull thistles from the badminton lawn—a Bruce Weber shoot come to life.

Last summer, Cindy spent much of her time here writing a book, which debuts this month. Called Becoming (Rizzoli), it marries 150 of her modeling images with some 50 short essays on topics such as posing nude, grappling with the arrival of digital photography, and aging. “I’m turning 50 next year,” she says, “and at this point I feel I’ve learned a few lessons worth sharing.”

In one fascinating essay, she discusses the feeling of fraudulence that often dogged her early on. “There’s that ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ thing,” she explains. “I remember finding myself sitting next to Valentino at dinner, or spilling a glass of wine on Julian Schnabel’s white suit in Paris, and I’d think, When are they going to figure out that I’m just Cindy from DeKalb?”

And she explores the subject of her own iconicity with a sometimes poignant candor. “There are days—not up here, thankfully—when I feel I need to deliver that Cindy Crawford thing,” she says. “But I’ve gained so much confidence with age. That’s something I never felt early on, even if my generation of models was paid to radiate it—the shoulder pads, glamazon, hair out to there, boobs up to here. It would have been nice to have all that confidence in my 20-year-old body.”

If the passage of time is on her mind, at the lake, at least, it slows to a standstill. Cindy never puts her watch on, and there are no clocks anywhere in the house—something that Rande learned to insist upon when he was a nightlife impresario.

“The point here is to slow everything down,” Cindy says. “Life moves quickly, but it will wait.”